OCD is so sneaky - Need help with ERP

I’m going through it. I know it will get better but it sucks so much. Look up Catherine Pittman. She talks about all of this research that shows that the amygdala stores emotional memories separate from the brain and reacts to weird stuff immediately without our understanding, like sleep anxiety stuff. She wrote two books about it. Both are helpful in understanding what is going on. Also, I’m a psychologist so this crap can happen to anyone. And finally, you will not die or go crazy or become psychotic from not sleeping. You will just eventually sleep anxious or not. But what will happen is that your amygdala stores the emotion of these anxiety events and recalls them when triggered by nighttime, bed, trying to sleep, etc. Exposure is the only thing that helps the amygdala learn. You can’t reason with it. So you have to do some imaginal exposures and when freaking out trying to sleep just accept that you might not sleep. Get up and wrap yourself in a blanket. Comfort yourself. Take a warm bath. Whatever makes you feel soothed. You will start to teach your amygdala that being awake at night is safe and it doesn’t need to have a cow. There is no danger. No danger. Just an annoying association that’s become a habit.

I have gone through this in bouts for a month or so at a time. Then I’ll be good for a year or two. Then a panic attack or being sick or something will trigger it and it will spook me again. I have gotten over it completely four times and pretty quickly. Look up Daniel Erickson on YouTube under Insomnia Insights. And download the app BedTyme. Read the book by Catherine Pittman Rewire Your Anxious Brain. And look up Sasha Stephen’s and Guy Meadows. You have to accept the uncertainty and the possibility that your worst outcome might come true. You have to be okay to sit with it and not fight it or build compulsions around it. You can trust that not sleeping won’t hurt you. You DO NOT HAVE FFI. Everyone thinks that at one point including me. There were like virtually no people in the world who have had it but a bizzilion people who think that their sleep anxiety is novel and unusual and unfixable. I’m sharing this as someone who has gone through the same thing and gotten out of it every time within a month or two. Your brain remembers what you are afraid of. Your amygdala is always watching. You have to trick it by not caring about sleep. It will happen when it happens. And don’t worry about anxiety. It will run it’s course and when you stop caring about sleep it will stop happening.

Same thing for me- I am so scared of not sleeping. Sleep really freaks me out, like the thought that it just happens to you and you can’t “control” it

Were you able to find a solution? Going through the exact same thing

thank you so much for writing this

I get so much anxiety about it that I can’t sleep. And then I’m not able to sleep during the day because of the cortisol and stress from struggling all night. I also have a day time job and a child. I went through a bout of insomnia that made me anxious and learned that it is my anxiety that was keeping me up. This helped the first time but then I started to become afraid of having anxiety at night because I didn’t want it to keep me up. Not wanting the anxiety to happen made it happen. The way out of that loop was to stop caring about it happening. I watched a lot of Daniel Erickson’s videos on YouTube and it helped so much. I have a stable sleep schedule and it does help.

Please, someone help me:(